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COVID: released on purpose?
This is the most disruptive (and deadly, according to the government) of our lifetimes and I haven't seen any leaders talk about COVID as a tragedy or natural disaster. The lack of any blood, or even any question of blame in response an event of this magnitude is very weird. A large fraction of people believe COVID was a lab leak from some combination of China and the US, but there is no discussion about it. It would have been easy enough to throw Fauci and Daszak or some Chinese guys under the bus without any other damage, but we don't even get a sacrificial lamb. Furthermore, the policies they did in response are policies they wanted to do anyway and are happy about.
Governments either believe they owe their people nothing (believable!), or this was such an enormous crime that pulling the thread is too dangerous to attempt.
Ultimately, I don't think the origin of the virus really matters.
There are two popular scenarios for the introduction of COVID into the world.
The commonly accepted scenario, where the virus emerged in bats consumed at a wet market in Wuhan.
The commonly disparaged scenario, where the virus was the product of activity occuring in lab near to the wet market in Wuhan.
If scenario 1 is true, China deliberately withheld information about the virus from the WHO in the first month of the pandemic. This was information that might have been of benefit to other world leaders in planning health strategies.
However, those world leaders spent the first few months encouraging behaviour that would directly contribute to the spread of the virus, before u-turning and banning not only intimate contact with strangers but also contact with those close to you for months at a time. If China had co-operated and released full information, would they have acted upon it?
If scenario 2 is true, then as you say a handful of the world's elite aided and abetted an extremely dangerous practise that produced a pandemic, then tried to mitigate it by one-upping each other in terms of damaging hygiene theatre. With the introduction of the vaccine (which I would like to point out that governments were doubly lucky in that it came out incredibly quickly and did not have terrible repurcussions when they decided to inject into literally everyone), WEIRD nations were offered an out and everything that was done to you should be forgotten.
I note with interest that only the US media has produced articles to the effect of requesting an amnesty for actions taken during the pandemic. This is mostly a product of the US having a significant anti-lockdown political movement in the form of the republicans. In most European nations measures had bi-partisan support questioning the measures is an extremely fast way to make yourself a pariah.
In both scenarios, the public demonstrated that they could be mostly cowed into submission with threats of mass death several orders of magnitude greater than observed reality and readily available bread and circuses, which very happily dived into. Some have taken to being a Nietzschean Last Man with incredible devotion. If I was someone like Biden or Johnson or Xi or whoever I would not be remotely afraid of the man in the street, or at the very least I would re-evaluate just what exactly would drive him to rise up and overthrow me, because everything I've done to him so far barely got a peep out of him. I might even release COVID-like viruses all the time for fun.
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